We’re in the home stretch now, and really aren’t looking for new bones. Instead, we’re trying to get out the small bones, and jacket the larger patches. Since the skull fragment we found a few days ago turned out to be isolated, I decided to remove it without jacketing (above).

Here’s the bone after removal:

You may have also noticed in the top photo the rib passing under the skull fragment; we took that out as well:

The fracture in the middle of the rib was caused by the overlying skull fragment pushing down on the rib, crushing it.

Tim found an unusual bone on the west side of the pit:

I’m not sure about this one, but I think it’s part of the coracoid of the turtle Syllomus. If so, it’s the first turtle coracoid we’ve found at Carmel Church.

We also pulled out a nice photogenic example of a tooth from the cow shark Notorynchus cepidianus:

We found lots of other small bones, mostly from fish, in our trenches today, so we didn’t get quite as far as I’d hoped. I think we still need to make one more jacket, and I hope we can get to it tomorrow.